The U.S. Department of Labor says it recovered $604,000 in back overtime wages for 829 hourly workers at an Indiana auto parts plant. The money came from Toa (USA) LLC in Mooresville, where investigators found a non-discretionary attendance bonus was left out of the overtime calculation. The finding was reported on Oct. 28, and it covers workers paid by the hour rather than on salary.
What the Wage and Hour Division found
The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division investigated and concluded that the company violated the overtime rules of the Fair Labor Standards Act, Insurance Journal reported. The violation covered applicable workweeks in which hourly employees earned an attendance bonus and also worked overtime.
Toa is an automotive supplier with manufacturing facilities in Mooresville. The report describes it as the primary body structure and suspension components supplier for Subaru of Indiana Automotive and Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America.
Is a bonus missing from an overtime rate?
Hourly workers who earn a bonus tied to attendance, production or similar targets should look at how overtime is calculated in the weeks that bonus is paid. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a bonus that is non-discretionary, meaning the worker is promised it in advance for meeting a goal, belongs in the regular rate on which overtime is figured. A bonus left out makes the overtime rate too low.
Insurance Journal’s account gives no per-worker share of the $604,000, no period covered and no quote from a Labor Department official.
Spread evenly, $604,000 across 829 workers comes to about $729 each. That is only an average. Each worker’s share would depend on how many overtime hours he or she worked in the weeks a bonus was paid, so one person might receive far less and another far more.
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Overtime under the federal law is pay at one and a half times the regular rate for hours past 40 in a week. The regular rate is not always the base wage. It generally includes other pay tied to the work, such as a promised production or attendance bonus, which is why the Mooresville finding turned on a single line of the pay formula.
A discretionary bonus is different. If the employer decides on its own, at the end of the period, whether to pay a bonus and how much, and did not promise it ahead of time, it can stay out of the rate. The dispute at plants like Toa usually comes down to whether workers were told in advance about the attendance reward.
How a bonus changes the overtime rate
A hypothetical shows the effect. A worker paid $20 an hour works 45 hours in a week and earns a $50 attendance bonus. Straight-time pay is $900, so the week totals $950 with the bonus, and the regular rate works out to about $21.11 an hour.
Overtime for the five extra hours is then half the regular rate on top of straight time, about $52.78. Without the bonus in the rate, it comes to $50. The shortfall is $2.78 for that one week, which is small on its own and large once it repeats across weeks and hundreds of workers.
That arithmetic is why back-wage totals reach six figures at a single plant. A few dollars short per paycheck, for hundreds of workers, adds up across many pay periods.
A second overtime recovery this month
The Mooresville case was not the only overtime recovery announced in October. A federal court order in New Jersey, reported by Recruiting Headlines, requires drywall installer P & B Partitions to pay $725,000 in back wages, damages and civil money penalties after the Labor Department found 48 workers were denied overtime pay.
The two cases involve different violations. In New Jersey the department found workers went unpaid for pre-shift time spent waiting for transportation to jobsites. In Indiana the issue was the pay formula for overtime hours that were paid.
Workers at any plant that pays attendance or production bonuses can ask a simple question of their payroll office: was the bonus counted when overtime was figured? The answer is usually a line on the stub or in the payroll policy, and it takes a few minutes to find.
Where wage questions go
The Wage and Hour Division is the federal office that handles overtime and minimum wage complaints, and it is the free route for a worker who thinks a pay stub is wrong.
A worker who suspects a problem can pull a recent stub from a week with overtime and a bonus. The stub should show hours, the base rate, the bonus and the overtime pay. If the overtime pay looks the same as it would without the bonus, the question is worth taking to the division or a payroll office in writing.
Time matters too. Federal law generally gives workers two years to recover unpaid overtime, and three years when the violation was willful. A stub that looks wrong this fall may be worth raising soon, because the oldest weeks fall out of reach first.
Overtime looking light on a stub after a bonus month?
A verbal question to a supervisor leaves no trail, and a wage problem that goes unwritten is easy to lose. The Mooresville recovery shows the money can be real, but it also shows how slowly a shortfall surfaces when workers see only a total on a stub.
No kit covers wage claims, so the closest fit is the written-response job: 50 Letters to SSA, IRS, Banks & Insurers is a set of fill-in letters, each with when to send it, where, the deadline and what to enclose. The 113-page book also includes bank letters for frozen accounts, unauthorized transfers and card disputes.
Get fill-in letters for a stub that left a bonus out of overtime →
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
